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EPA Turns To Private Partners For Green Tech Solutions

EPA sees a market in manure and other enviornmental problems (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facing budget constraints and hostile conservatives, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate less by enlisting more private partners to solve environmental problems through green technology, according to agency documents and a recently retired EPA official.

This effort, which began in earnest 18 months ago, may have a higher profile beginning with a May 14 Technology Market Summit the EPA is hosting at American University in Washington. The summit will pursue private-sector solutions to three emerging EPA priorities — pollution by small companies in the automotive supply chain, fence-line monitoring of pollutants from uncertain sources, and biodigesters and biogas.

Those topics “will serve as case studies to explore barriers and solutions related to technology, policy and finance,” according to the Summit flyer (pdf).

And those case studies may be highlighted with appearances by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and Secretary of Ariculture Tom Vilsack.

“It may turn out that the May conference is a high level political event,” said Walter Kovalick Jr., who retired recently as an administrator for the EPA’s Regional Office in Chicago.

Kovalick helped pen the EPA Roadmap for the agency’s new emphasis on innovation, which pays special attention to private financing and market opportunities. According to the Roadmap:

Of special importance to EPA’s strategy is the role of private capital markets because of their growing interest in environmental technology as a platform to help companies reduce costs, expand product markets, and increase profitability and jobs. However, representatives of these private capital markets have rarely been a part of the conversation on planning mainstream public R&D programs for environmental technologies, or how these technologies will be deployed.

EPA programs need to be better linked to private sector mechanisms for environmental technology development, deployment, and funding. Public-private collaboration will help connect regulators, technology developers, business developers, finance, and markets, taking a focused approach to facilitating commercialization and deployment of innovative solutions.

“Partner, partner, partner to get things done,” is how Kovalick explained the EPA’s new approach in an appearance Monday at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

For example, EPA could approach livestock waste as a market opportunity rather than merely a regulatory necessity, Kovalick said:

We have these huge farms, we’ve got confined animals, the waste that comes from them ends up getting rained on and washed into rivers. What could we do if someone could figure out a solution?…

For the EPA to say to the country, this causes rivers, streams, lakes, and a variety of bays around the country to be degraded—there’s a business opportunity here if we could figure out a way to get the nitrogen out of animal feeding operations and figure out a way to recycle it.

The Roadmap calls for the EPA to establish and publicize its top priorities—before acting upon them—so private companies can consider them as opportunities.

“We aren’t setting a standard, we’re just announcing this problem is huge, and of course it’s about the market and making it seem like a big enough opportunity, so whether we crank down on the standard or not, perhaps someone could come up with a great solution.”

The Roadmap also calls for EPA to cultivate partnerships with other government agencies, to embrace technological innovation at each level of the agency, and to develop closer relationships with venture capitalists.

“There ought to be a specific point of contact for venture capital issues,” Kovalick said. “Suppose some venture capitalist actually wanted to talk to someone at EPA. On what door would they knock?”

EPA began drafting the new policy emphasis early in 2010, when Administrator Jackson, echoing President Obama, began heralding innovation:

“Innovation is the ‘sweet spot’ where our economic and environmental interests meet,” Jackson told the National Press Club in March of 201o. “It’s where business leaders and conservationists can come together to hash out solutions – solutions that have filled American history with environmental achievements and helped us lead the global economy,”

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How is this approach different than, say, Germany’s? I get nervous about Obama’s stimulus/capitalist approach. Are there any striking examples of how he’d like to do more with less, other than his CAFE standards (which would probably happen anyway with gasoline at $4/gallon.)?

I think the best example is one that’s so overladen with politics people will find it difficult to perceive: cap and trade. Although it was vilified by conservatives, cap & trade was a market solution, and that’s partly why it was endorsed by the industries involved. But since it was shot down by the Senate, it’s being replaced by the traditional EPA approach: regulation through the Clean Air Act. Walter Kovalick said, “We’re not giving up. We’re switching gears to use a much blunter instrument.” But this story is about changes at a much finer level of detail—using environmental problems to foster innovation, with the aid of government direction and sometimes with the aid of government resources.

There’s a good example in Ohio, a Water Technology Innovation Cluster, in which the EPA convened experts from “universities, large corporations, emerging companies, federal government, state government, local government, and economic development associations,” helped them form a consortium around the problem of water pollution, and then backed away and let the consortium proceed on its own initiative.